Sublime Illusions, Debased Realities

A commenter on my post about rafting the Snake River thinks my experience was more real than that of a jet skier:

The individual freedoms preached from the right don’t have much real meaning to me, and I keep that mantra filed next to creative destruction as another kind of de-evolution from what america and being an american meant to me. If you can’t beat them join them. Kinda like, it is easier just to hitch a ride to space and a rocky mountain high is easier on the couch with a six pack and big screen tv. What was the conundrum again? Oh, balancing individual freedoms with national and future interests. Well, that is what more channels are for, I reckon. And that there is the real illusion. Paddling the Snake? I bet that was real.

I understand his point, but I think we need to keep the word “real” from being a synonym for “good.” Obviously, on a literal level, every experience is real – even the experience of a hallucination is a real experience of a hallucination. So what did I mean when I talked about my rafting trip being meaningful, beautiful, highly worthwhile, and yet in a sense illusory, while attributing a level of “reality” to the jet skiers and power boaters?

What I meant by “real” is something like “integrated into the rhythms of life.” I was a tourist on the Snake River. I had an experience, one that was organized and curated by others. I am not willing to make the kind of commitment necessary to have a more “real” experience – to become an independent rafter. Most people, I venture, would not be willing to do so – the most they’d be willing to do is be tourists.

Which is fine. But I understand why a power boater might be annoyed at being lectured by a bunch of tourists about what kind of experience he should be having.

I have no problem arguing that the rafter experiences something superior, something sublime, that the power boater is missing. I have no problem arguing that the power boater’s experience is of a debased reality – and, moreover, that making the power boater’s experience available to the great mass of people necessarily debases reality for the rafter as well, who otherwise would have the opportunity to experience the sublime.

But providing a great mass of people with relatively equal access to a debased reality is a plausible way to describe culture in a democracy.

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5 Responses to Sublime Illusions, Debased Realities

We westerners also raft down our rivers. We experience it very often by learning to row through rapids and manage and organize our gear to make camp day after day on backcountry rivers.

And we hate the jet skiers with a fiery intensity. We also outnumber them on our rivers. They outnumber us on the reservoirs, of course. (There are no natural freshwater lakes to speak of in the desert regions.)

The real trouble on the rivers is that there’s enough room for only limited use. Jet skiers, between their waves and noise pollution and the danger they pose to everyone around them, take up a hundred or a thousand times as much space per person as rafters and kayakers. They destroy a scarce public resource of nature and quiet and contribute to ongoing erosion and spreading of noxious weeds with their artificial waves and wakes.

That’s why we don’t want them around us and our limited riparian systems.

Well, there’s a class element also; a lot of us despise the drunken shouting and cheerful willingness to put their and our lives at risk with their reckless actions because it is low class behavior. Mostly, though, we have legitimate complaints.

The nexus of Reality-Nature-Technology-Culture with Personal Reality
(both bodily & psychological identity) is a huge subject.
But we lack any “common language” to address such issues,
mostly because the notion that there could be such a thing
as Philosophy of Technology, is an alien concept.

Sarcasm alert:
Our job is to not Question Technology.
Our job is to adapt to Technology —
both as consumers, and especially as producers of “Innovation”.

AmConMag is correct that Culture is a fundamental basis of Politics.
But Technology is a fundamental basis of Culture.

It’s INSANE to seriously discuss “conserving” any way of life,
without addressing the Technological Elephant in the room.

But nobody is aware of their own insanity, because they are blind
to the fact that Technology is their Environment.

“the local family with a vacation home on the river where they keep a
jet boat and a pair of jet skis? A rafter has a very different
experience of the river than a jet skier — one that the rafter may be
inclined to see as more authentic. … But she’s a tourist. The jet
skier is a local. The river is part of the jet skier’s life. Moreover,
the rafter’s experience has a massive logistical scaffolding behind it
to get her onto the river in the first place, and, once she’s left it,
to return her to civilization. The ugly jet boat, by contrast, is an
actual mode of transportation. You can actually use it to get upriver
to your vacation home. And, of course, the rafting trip is a pretty
expensive proposition. Any hierarchy of values that places the rafting
tourist near the top because of its ecological sensitivity or
authenticity, is, for better or worse (or both) also an elitist one.”

No, sorry. That completely misses the Infrastructure Context.

What Tech transports these “Locals” from their primary home,
to where their jet boat is docked?
How were the building materials for vacation home transported to its site?
Did the vacation home drywall come from China? Concrete from Mexico?
Even if they felled trees on the property to construct the home,
where did their tools come from? Do they survive by eating river fish?

And for most people of my generation, being able to afford
the time and expense of a vacation home, was an elite luxury.

We live and die in Infrastructure.
Over half the global population is now urban.
The rural exodus to cities is still driven by hunger.

Most of the people who can survive in a “primitive” environment today,
are techno-assisted elites.

We are allowed to have long Technological Tethers;
long Logistics Chains. But even off-the-grid “Freedom”
is just another variant of “self-reliant” intellectual masturbation.

Individuals and Culture are mass-produced products of Technology,
in the deep senses examined in Ian Hacking’s “Historical Ontology”.

I also highly recommend Tim Ingold’s “Perception of the Environment”.
Although I haven’t yet gotten to his analysis of Technology,
he’s developed an excellent foundation, from perspective of
a social anthropologist.

Your original post mentioned “externalities”.
But the cultural externalities of any Technology
are arguably more important than (narrowly-defined)economic externalities.

For example, the Kandahar Intel Fusion Center reported that a
new foreign-funded well in the center of an Afghan village was destroyed.
But not by the Taliban. Rather, the village women destroyed the well,
because it was destroying their social life:

Before, this “Techno Progress”, they had to walk a long way
to a river for water. The new well at village center deprived them
of their only opportunity to gather socially with other women.

Europe experienced similar dislocation of women’s social life,
when washing machines were introduced.

The Amish understand this — hence their collective
cultural decisionmaking on whether any individual
should adopt a new Technology.

If the dominant society had their Cultural Maturity
and individual discipline, we would not today be living
inside a digital panoptic cocoon.

Just another “progress trap”.
I guess we need a new, improved Technological Fix ;-(

I’m with you. I’m a canoe paddler who has had the experience more than once of being buzzed by jet skis. I neither know nor care if they were drunk or sober, it is enough to note that they thought it was absolutely hilarious to race straight at us, then turn at the last minute to try to swamp us with their wake. There does seem to be something about the machine that attracts/encourages that sort of behavior.

>they thought it was absolutely hilarious to race straight at us, then turn at the last minute to try to swamp us with their wake. There does seem to be something about the machine that attracts/encourages that sort of behavior.

I recall a film in junior high describing a similar phenomenon, when kindly, considerate Mr. Walker gets into his car and becomes Mr. Wheeler.

Really I was just telling a story about my river tamed and the unfortunate consequences which I don’t really think anybody wants to argue are fortunate when you weigh everything on a balance. If I was making any judgement concerning reality, it was concerning the reality of being an american and the choices we have to make concerning shared interests and individual rights. My central point was the individual rights argued for by the more republican leaning right wing political spectrum appear, from my perspective, to not really be individual rights at all. They appear to center on what is most beneficial for capitalist gain, with the pseudo caveat that capitalistic gain may best be accomplished through creative destruction. And before anybody thinks I am whining about jet skiers splashing me, or making waves, let me assure you that riding waves in my kayak is fun and imho getting splashed by the cool guys throttleing around with their thumbs just helps illustrate to them and anybody watching, who is legit and who the posers are for the advertised individual freedoms to destroy creation in whatever man-made golden calf currently in vogue are. Like, just look at the material girls.
What you experienced may not be real as I suggested. And the local individual rights to enjoy what is just outside their door might trump the rest of americans tourist type enjoyment of public lands, rivers and taxpayer financed man-made lakes, not to mention clean air and water. All I was saying is that is unfortunate, and that the river untamed is part of being an american that I miss whether Joe Sixpack takes ownership of how the river should be enjoyed, or India and Chinese corporations with the Japanese factories turning out the jet skis, outboard motors and big screen tv’s own what it means to be an american.
You do get what you pay for, and the best part of america was free and untamed in the past but will take money, and a youthful interest not already lost to a tiny hand held world, to preserve now. The illusion is that the individual freedom requires conformation to pop culture and 2D substitute entertainment on the big screen. I was not shilling for a way of life or what it means to be an american. There is no money in that. We all know people do shill for the right to define american freedoms. They may even be americans. I’m just saying that is unfortunate. But really, I’m just testing to see if this is censored like all my other recent commentary.